


Surprise Visit

by Rinkafic



Series: Keri 'verse [16]
Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Gen, Stargate Atlantis AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-29
Updated: 2012-06-29
Packaged: 2017-11-08 20:16:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,783
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/447100
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rinkafic/pseuds/Rinkafic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sunny is a refugee that Cadman has sorta taken in.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Surprise Visit

The nice lady doctor had made Sunny go inside a machine and then the machine made noise and a light shined over her. After the light went out, Sunny’s nose itched and she felt all tingly and her held felt even more buzzy than it had when she first got here. Laura came over and picked her up and took her out of the machine. 

The doctor, who told Sunny her name was Doctor Frasier, looked in her ears and her nose and her mouth. She listened to her heartbeat and let Sunny hear it too. She shined a bright light in her eyes. All of that wasn’t so bad. But Sunny didn’t like when she got stuck with the needle; that hurt.

After they were done with the doctor, Laura took her to get something to eat. The room was very crowded. Lots of people stared at her, and it made her a little afraid, seeing all the strangers. She moved her chair very close to Laura’s. Laura put an arm around her and she wasn’t quite as scared after that. Many of the people wore white coats like the kind her mom and dad used to wear when they worked. Seeing them made her think of them and that made her a little sad. She put the rest of her sandwich down because she didn’t feel like eating it anymore.

“Tired, sweetie?” Laura asked, tugging on one of Sunny’s ponytails. “So am I. Want to go have a nap?” She nodded, wanting to be away from the lunch room and the people. 

They went to Laura’s room and Laura put sheets and a blanket on the sofa, and took one of the pillows off her bed. After pulling off her shoes, Sunny curled up on her side and Laura pulled the blanket over her. It wasn’t very cold, but the blanket made it feel like a bed, like she used to have on Earth. 

Laura gave her a kiss on her forehead, just like Daddy used to do when she was going to sleep. “You snuggle down here and have a rest. I’ll be right there if you need me, okay?” Sunny watched Laura go over and flop on her bed, without even taking her shoes off. 

~*~

 

When Sunny opened her eyes it was dark. She thought she heard whispering, it was kind of like the buzzy noise she had been hearing that had gone away when she was having her nap. She sat up and looked around, but didn’t see anything moving. Laura was snoring on the bed. 

She went to the bathroom Laura had showed her to make tinkles. When she came out, she still heard the whispery sound. She knew Laura was very tired, she had heard the doctor telling the man Laura called Sir about it when they thought Sunny couldn’t hear them, but Sunny had very good hearing. She didn’t want to wake Laura up to tell her about the whispers.

Sunny put her shoes on and then went to the door. It opened before she even got to it. That made her smile. He stepped back and it closed and opened again when she stepped forward. She went out into the hallway. When she turned one way, the whispers were quiet. So she turned the other way and heard them again. She started to walk, trying to hear what the words were, but they were not clear.

At the end of a hallway was a stairwell. She took one step up but the whispers stopped. “Down?” she said and went to the other steps leading down. The noises started again when she went that way. 

She walked for a long time, turning when the whispers stopped to let her know she was going the wrong way. She came to a door and it opened into a large round room. There was a noise and a circle opened on the floor and a round table came up out of it. Curious, Sunny walked over to it. There were crystals on the top of the table, many small ones. 

The crystals were smooth and cold when she stroked her finger lightly along the edge of them. The whispers went silent and she pulled her hand back. “Do you want me to press one?”

One of the crystals on the panel began to glow. Reaching out her hand, Sunny let it hover over the glow. When the whispers began again, she touched the crystal and pressed it. 

“Well, hello! Aren’t you a surprise!” a voice exclaimed from behind her. 

Sunny spun around, suddenly frightened. There was a woman there but there had been no one in the room before. She was smiling and had short wavy brown hair and was wearing a red shirt. 

“Are you here alone? Rodney and Radek aren’t with you? What’s your name?” the lady asked.

Sunny did not know a Radek or a Rodney, so she shook her head in answer to the question. “Sunny.”

“You don’t need to be afraid; I’m not able to hurt you. I’m just a hologram, no substance.” She moved towards the table with the crystals and waved her hand. Her hand went right through one side of the table and out the other. “See?”

“A ghost?” Sunny had heard a lot of stories about ghosts.

“No, not a ghost. I’m a projection, part of the city now. How did you find your way down here, Sunny?”

She shrugged. “I heard whispers, I came to find them. They led me here.”

“Do you still hear them?”

Sunny nodded. 

“I wonder what that could be about? The AI must be up to something.” She moved around to the front of the crystals. She pointed to one of them. “Could you press that one, Sunny? It will send me back into the city’s systems so that I can have a look around.”

“You’re not a bad ghost?”

“No, I assure you I’m not. I used to work here; I want to help make sure the city is safe.”

The whispers were very loud, and grew even louder as Sunny put her finger on the crystal. “Okay.”

She vanished when Sunny pressed the crystal. A few seconds later, she reappeared. “Something very bad is happening, Sunny. I cannot access the systems to do anything about it. The medical records show that Rodney is in the infirmary, he would be the one to fix this. You’ll have to help me.”

“I’m just a little girl, how can I help you?”

“You’re a very special little girl, Sunny. You heard the city when she needed help and called out. You can do this. I’m going to download my program into that big crystal over there, that’s where my program was originally stored. I need you to pull that crystal out and take it with you when you leave. My program is a little different than the others and when they try to fix the city, I could be erased.”

“I guess I can do that.”

The hologram lady crouched down in front of her and smiled. “Take the crystal to Sub Commander Sheppard. Tell him that there is a destructive virus in the city’s subsystems. Can you remember that?”

“Tell Sub Commander Sheppard that there is destructive virus in the city’s subsystems,” Sunny repeated dutifully. 

Standing up again, she smiled. “Good girl. Go as quickly as you can. I think the city will lead you to him. I don’t know why it didn’t bring him in the first place. Thank you, Sunny. I’m going now, pull the crystal out when you see the light blink and then go out.”

It was hard to pull the crystal from the panel, but Sunny finally wiggled it from the slot. Holding it in both hands, she left the room. The whispers led her back the way she had come. 

~*~

 

She used the transporter this time; the whispers helped her to press the right location. Following the instructions, she was led to a door. She pressed her hand on the control beside the door and waited. 

When the door opened, the man standing there was the one Laura called Sir. “Hey… Sunny? What’re you doing out and about at this hour?” He leaned out to look up and down the hallway.

“Are you Sub Commander Sheppard?” Sunny blurted. 

“No, I’m Mitchell, but I’ll get him.” He turned around and called, “John? You have an unexpected visitor.”

A man she hadn’t seen before came to the door, rubbing at his forehead. “Hi.”

Sunny took a deep breath and recited the message that she had been practicing the whole way here. “There is a destructive virus in the city’s subsystems.”

“Whoa, what?” he crouched down in front of her. “How do you know that, kiddo?”

“The hologram lady told me to tell you.”

Mitchell asked her, “Where did you see a hologram lady, Sunny?”

“I got up because the whispers were really loud and I followed them to a room and I saw the hologram lady and she went away and then came back and told me to give you the message. She went in here.” Sunny held up the crystal. “She said her program is special and that it would get overwritten when they fixed the city.”

Both men stood up. Mitchell went back into the room and came back, pulling on a shirt and fixing a radio over his ear. “You come with me, Sunny. John, go to the chair, see what you can figure out. Why did the city talk to her and not you?”

“She might have been trying; I’ve got a killer headache. I didn’t think it was Atlantis reaching out to touch, you know?” John said, disappearing into the room.

Tapping his radio, Mitchell said, “Zelenka, we might have a problem. It seems a hologram lady sent us a message about a virus in the city’s subsystems.” He took Sunny’s hand and walked towards the transporter. 

When they reached a big room with glass windows Mitchell let her sit on a chair with wheels as he talked to some people wearing uniforms. Sunny looked around, wondering what all the machines were for. A man with very fuzzy hair came running in and threw himself into a chair and began to type very quickly on a computer.

“Is true. Was hidden, working underneath. Is Sub Commander Sheppard in chair?” the man asked, he had a funny voice.

“He’s on his way there now.”

A lot of people came in and suddenly the room was crowded with very busy adults. She watched as view screens popped up and images from all over the city appeared. A nice man with brown hair smiled at her and pulled her chair close to his terminal to get her out of the path of other people that were rushing around.

“No time for flirting, Chuck,” the lady beside them said.

“Always time for safety, Amy; she was gonna get trampled.”

After she had been there for a little while, she heard Laura’s voice calling her. “Sunny? Sunny?” 

Laura came up the stairs and ran over to her, pulling her into a hug. “Why did you leave without telling me? Do you know how dangerous it is to wander around Atlantis alone?”

“I didn’t want to wake you up,” Sunny replied. 

“Sub Commander Sheppard has isolated problem. We will need to do a shut down and restart mainframe,” the man with the fuzzy hair said. 

“Let’s get out of the way, munchkin.” Laura picked her up and carried her over to the stairs and sat down. All the lights went off and then came back before Sunny could count to five. Everyone seemed to be very happy after that.

After a while, Mitchell and the fuzzy haired man came over to them. “Sunny, you did really well, letting us know about the virus. You said something about a crystal that the hologram lady went into?”

 

Reaching into her pocket, where she had put the crystal to keep it safe, Sunny pulled it out and looked at it. She chewed her lip and then handed it to Mitchell. 

“Radek?” Mitchell passed the crystal over.

The fuzzy haired man was Radek? Then it must be okay to give him the crystal, the hologram lady had said his name and asked where he was. 

Sheppard came up the stairs towards them, and he was smiling at Sunny. He stopped and ruffled her hair when he got to the step where she and Laura were still sitting. “Good work, kiddo.” He looked up at Radek, who was turning the crystal over in his hand and being very quiet. “While I was in the system, I activated the holo emitters in the Gate Room, Control Room and Conference Room. If we have an AI, I would really like the chance to talk to it.”

“Is not AI. But come, I will integrate program again,” Radek said. His voice made Sunny smile.

Blinking, Sunny yawned. “Long night, huh? I’ve got her, Cadman.” Sheppard put his hands under Sunny s arms and lifted her up, carrying her as he followed the others. She wrapped her legs around his waist and held on. The whispers began to fade away, but Sunny knew that it was because everything was fixed now.

Sheppard was strong and warm and he rocked in place a little bit as he stood beside Mitchell waiting for Radek to do things with the computer. Sunny put her head on his shoulder and closed her eyes. If she pretended, it was almost like her Daddy was holding her again.

“Is ready. Shall I activate, Commandant?” Radek asked. 

“Yes, please. I hope this isn’t the source of the problem,” Mitchell said.

Radek shook his head. “No, is code Rodney and I wrote. Is not malicious.” 

“Hello John, Radek, Laura. Hello again, Sunny.”

“Elizabeth?!?” Sheppard said, almost dropping Sunny. “Is that really you?”

“Surprise! I guess Rodney and Radek didn’t tell you about me? They uploaded my memory engrams and programmed a hologram for me.”

Sheppard turned around to face Radek. Sunny smiled and waved at the hologram lady over his shoulder. “Radek?”

“Slipped my mind. There is not enough power to maintain the hologram for a long time, so please, Sub Commander, do not waste it shouting at me, talk to Elizabeth.” Radek waved his hand at the hologram lady.

Sheppard bent and let Sunny down. Laura held a hand out to her so Sunny went to stand with her. 

“The presence I’ve been feeling in the interface, it isn’t an AI at all, is it? It’s been you?” Sheppard said as he circled the holog… Elizabeth.

“It has been both of us. There is an AI, but it is damaged. I have been trying to communicate, but I don’t have a clear path,” Elizabeth said.

Sheppard turned to Radek. “Can you do something about that?”

“I can try, will be hard without Rodney, will take much longer.” 

“Do what you can,” Mitchell said. “Doctor Weir, I wish we had longer to talk, your expertise would be invaluable, but we cannot afford to drain the ZPM to keep your hologram active at this time.”

Elizabeth looked over at him and smiled. “You’re my replacement, eh, Commodore Mitchell?”

“Yes, ma’am, say goodnight, John, you can talk to her again soon.”

“Until Radek gets me a better fix, try to use the jumper control programs to get to me in the chair Elizabeth. Those are very low usage and will stand out to me more.” 

“I’ll do that. Goodnight everyone. I hope to see you again soon. Thank you again Sunny.” Elizabeth waved at her and then disappeared.

Mitchell walked over and tweaked the end of Sunny’s nose. “As for you, young lady. No more wandering around the city alone. Always get an adult to go with you.”

“I will.”

He smiled, tugged her ponytail and walked away. He grabbed Sheppard’s hand and pulled him along too. “Night!” Sheppard called over his shoulder. 

“I think we’ve had enough surprises for one day. Let’s go, sweetie, time for bed. Goodnight Radek,” Laura said.

“Little girl, your name is Sunny, no?” Sunny nodded her head. “You did a very good thing; you saved my work by bringing crystal here. Thank you. I am owing you a favor.” He leaned over and kissed her forehead. 

As Laura tucked her in on the couch, Sunny looked up at her. “The whispers stopped, everything is quiet now.”

“That’s good. You sleep now, sweetie, and we’ll talk about all of this in the morning.” Laura smoothed back her hair and kissed her cheek. 

 

The End


End file.
